We made the decision as a Leadership team yesterday to mandate remote work for all our employees at least until the end of March. As everyone knows, the situation escalated quickly, especially in the last few days, and our position of be safe, don’t come to work if you’re sick or have symptoms (we have unlimited PTO, use it), and we’ll keep an eye on things had to be altered. Even though we hadn’t had any confirmed cases in Austin yet, it seemed like the responsible thing to do. Lo and behold, on our first remote day today, confirmed cases have cropped up in Austin.
Luckily we are all equipped to work from home full-time, nearly everyone at the company does it already one day a week, and continue business operations as usual. But we’re not used to being this remote, so this will be a test for our team. We’re all thinking of ways to stay connected. Leadership implemented a daily video stand-up at 8:50 am every morning so we can stay connected and monitor the business (this obviously has greater economical impacts we’re keeping a close eye on). Everyone needs to have cameras on for meetings — seeing faces is important. And we’re all stressing over-communication.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t work from home as often, opting to go into my office since I don’t have an ideal home setup (no desk, office chair, or second monitor). To mitigate, I borrowed a portal second monitor and hauled an office chair home to transform my kitchen table space into something more permanent for the next two weeks (or god forbid longer). All went well today and I wasn’t tempted by non-work distraction by mimicking an office environment.
This was kind of fun though — we did our first all remind company meeting this afternoon (as we do every Friday). 41 people on the call and it went really well. We stayed muted and used the chat to coordinate turns to talk as needed so it wasn’t a cacophony of noise. The Brady Bunch theme song was played to open and close the meeting.
We’ll see how these next two weeks go — this level of social distancing is intense even for me (who loves a healthy dose of social distance anyway). At least I can still go out on the greenbelt.
With Love,
Natalie
Way to be proactive. Good job!